Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to messaging session management and more particularly to file transfer operations during a messaging session
Description of the Related Art
Messaging has proven to be the most ubiquitously utilized aspect of globally connected computing. Messaging has evolved from simple internal electronic messaging and rudimentary chat sessions to modern robust reliable electronic mail, instant messaging and text messaging. Electronic mail, instant messaging and text messaging differ in terms of immediacy and supporting infrastructure. In the case of electronic mail, different “e-mail” clients interact with one or more e-mail servers to facilitate the asynchronous exchange of e-mail messages over the global Internet in most cases. In the case of instant messaging, as in the case of e-mail, different instant messaging clients communicate by way of one or more common instant messaging servers. However, unlike e-mail, in instant messaging, communications are synchronous in nature. Finally, in the case of text messaging, the telephone infrastructure supports the synchronous exchange of messages in real time.
Modern message exchanges provide for the basis exchange of textual messages. More advanced messengers also permit the exchange of light imagery such as “emoticons”. Even more advanced messengers support the exchange of attached files. In particular, in the case of e-mail messaging, a file attachment can be transmitted along with an e-mail message and in some cases where the file contains an image, the image itself can be rendered as part of the e-mail message. In the case of text messaging, also an attached file containing an image can be rendered inline with text, or the attached file can be provided separately with a linked reference in the text message. Finally, in the case of instant messaging, an attached file can be included by reference to a textual form of an instant message.
Not all attachments, however, contain imagery. In many cases, attachments are other documents or images of documents. For many of these types of attachments, the documents can be very large in size, sometimes spanning, dozens, hundreds or even thousands of pages. Transmitting a file of so many pages can mean transmitting a file of especially large size. Storing message exchanges with large file attachments therefore can become somewhat of a resource waste. Especially, it is to be recognized that in any given attachment, in many circumstances only a small portion of the attached file is relevant to the context of the message exchange.